How do I generate enough money to be blogging full time?

I’ve seen this asked quite a few times before and I quite honestly feel like it’s sort of a ridiculous question. Not because the question itself is strange or odd, but because it’s so incredibly misleading.

When you ask this question, you’re misleading yourself into believing you don’t know the answer. And almost every single time, you do.

People who ask this question know exactly how most make money from blogging – by selling display ads on their site, using ad networks like Google Adsense and Media.net, selling their own products & eBooks from their website, and launching their own businesses by selling services through their blog. Most people who ask, “How do I generate enough money to be blogging full time?” do honestly know all this. So why do they bother asking?

It’s like they want some secret sauce – some one shot answer that’ll take them from knowing how to make a little bit of money to knowing how to make a lot of money online. If you think about it, that secret sauce one shot answer is obvious, though pretty disappointing considering how hard it is to crack – you need traffic. If you know how to make $10 online, you know how to make $10,000 online. The difference is in how many people you can reach.

If you’ve made any money online before you know that in order to generate enough money to become a full time blogger, from a monetization perspective, you don’t technically need to change up what you’re doing – you just need to do more of it and drive more traffic to your site. There’s obviously a difference between making $10 a month from your site and $1000 a month – because when you’re making $1000 a month you’re a lot closer to your end goal of being able to blog full time. That being said, don’t delude yourself into believing there’s some extra special recipe that the $1000 a month guy knows that you don’t know that’s helping him or her to make more than you. There isn’t. He/she is probably just getting more traffic than you because their content is more interesting, he/she ranks better in Google than you, has more social followers, etc.

You know exactly what you need to generate enough money to be blogging full time – traffic. I didn’t need to tell you that that’s most likely the difference between the $10 a month you make and the $1000 another blogger makes.

What does this mean in practical terms? Test. Learn how to drive traffic to your site. Don’t publish low-quality content and piss off the readers you do have. Develop a loyal readership by sticking to quality content production and promotion, and don’t just give up a few months in, because becoming a successful blogger takes a lot longer than that.

Success online is completely possible, but there’s no real secret to it. Just a lot of grinding away doing what you know will increase the quality, helpfulness, and reach you have, thereby getting you more traffic and views to your website. Going from part time to full time is just a slow slope upward – until you realize one day you’re no longer part time at all.